Everyone is Switching to Mac!

August 22, 2009

Apple has announced Snow Leopard's official release date as August 28, 2009. This means a few different things for users of 1Password 2, as well as the beta testers and future users of 1Password 3.

1Password 2

First, and most importantly: 1Password 2 generally seems to work on Snow Leopard, both as a stand-alone app and with most of its browser plugins (more on those in a minute). However: 1Password 2 will not be supported on Snow Leopard in any way. Please see Update: 1Password on Snow Leopard.

In order to use 1Password 2 on Snow Leopard, you will need to handicap Safari into running in 32-bit mode and do a little hacking. While 10.6 Snow Leopard looks a lot like its little 10.5 Leopard brother, the changes under the hood (like 64-bit mode) are quite extensive. Here are the steps to run 1Password 2 in Snow Leopard:

Set Safari to run in 32-bit mode by quitting Safari, right-clicking Safari.app in your Applications folder, and choosing "Get Info." In the inspector that appears, select "32-bit mode," then close the window.

Right-click Safari again and choose "Show Package Contents." Then browse to /Contents/Info.plist and open this file with a preferences editor. MacUpdate is a good resources for finding these kinds of apps.

Look for an entry in this preferences file called CFBundleVersion and copy its four- or five-digit value. We could just tell you this number, but it will change and you need to repeat these steps each time Safari is upgraded.

Set the Safari.MaxBundleVersion in this file to the number you copied in step 3, and save the file. Do not use any other number besides the one you get from Safari's Info.plist file. This is unsupported and, more importantly, untested (hence being unsupported; it's a vicious cycle).

1Password 2 should now work in Safari on Snow Leopard, but remember: we can't support this configuration. If you need help, there may be others in our forums running the same configuration.

1Password 3

When it is officially released (soon-ish-y), 1Password 3 will be fully compatible with and supported on both Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.5 Leopard. 1Password 3 will not support 10.4 Tiger.

The 1Password 3 beta is currently working on Snow Leopard; we have a lot of beta testers on Snow Leopard and we have been doing development exclusively on it for months now.

Fortunately, private beta testing of 1Password 3 is winding down, so we are slowly starting to open up testing to more people. Snow Leopard users need 1Password 3 the most, so users who start 1Password 2 on Snow Leopard will be asked if they would like to beta test 1Password 3. Beta testing for Leopard users will be available shortly.

To recap, 1Password 3 is still in beta so there may still be quirks or a few unpolished buttons, so please let us know if you run into problems. If testing and reporting issues is not your idea of fun, you should wait for the final 1Password 3 release. For those testing, be sure to report issues in the 1Password Early Access forum as everything is still under NDA.